+ Psalm
BY AIDAN FORSTER
2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
My southbound passage here,
forgetting each field
as I entered it, hungering—
I gambled toward the lodestar of him.
I saw no difference, then,
between my lover, hogtied,
& the saint in my mirror,
between the rented room
& its thousand illnesses,
between myself & the dawn,
its cord of fever gathered around me.
I teethed his knuckles like a hooksong,
fucked myself into the sort of beauty
who wields an ivory hammer
to hasten her delicate thaw,
a ghost of fortune flickering
through his many rooms.
Unhooved, untrussed, after,
lying in each other’s tweed,
he told me his fantasy:
one million men arriving,
cock-handed, pearls of sweat
blazing between their eyebrows.
He said their eyes might wax
that which endears him to me.
He traced his name on my chest
in the shape of a locket,
a charm of possession,
& though he didn’t ask
I harbored my own fantasy:
that the business of immunity
would invite me into
its far-off parlor of sedge
as its darling apprentice,
beautiful as any elsewhere,
fashioned only for lovely tasks:
pouring sweet water
into orchid-shaped goblets—
trimming the beards
of ancient, blushing coinage—
splitting, with the jade knife
at the end of the world,
a melon into clean, boyish halves.
The phrase ‘cock-handed’ comes from Jameson Fitzpatrick’s poem ‘Fuck the Police.’
PrEP Kabuki
BY AIDAN FORSTER
2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
When burial. When banquet.
When meadow & its scroll of frailty.
When viewing anatomical
cross-sections of my lymphatic system,
I imagine a finch blooding
toward an elsewhere
& I imagine it one thousand times.
When, later, I nick
my finger in the kitchen,
it seems wrong I’m so ready
to jettison what sustains me,
wrong to imagine my body as other
than a dizzying graph of its nights,
a lineage of boys lusted
into contrapuntal ghosts.
When scalpel. When rippling
orb of milk. When all day
I flicker, Josephenic,
in lace & citrine, the pill
ranging ever southward within me.
When I think infection,
my general practitioner
crowns & uncrowns
my skull with a paper tiara.
When my lover forgets to pull out,
I siren into a sample
section of a dying population.
When I pass a garden,
I inspect each peony
for signs of collapse
& my boyish attar
dissembles into foam.
When asked where I imagine
myself in three to ten years,
I conjure a Carolinian parlor
& point to its most exquisite
& improbable candelabra
as an effigy of my rapidly
approaching absence.
When asked if I am going to die,
I marvel at my formal ineptitude:
never the quaking hyacinth
teetering behind some handsome ear—
always the shook boy
& his demented mirage of skin—
& when the question repeats itself,
I’ll smash my tetric want
into a poultice of mercy
& press my lips to its impish edge—
this nothing, really, like a life.
Sexting Three Men on My iPhone While My First Crush Becomes Every Teary-Eyed Boy in a Gay Marriage Proposal Video
BY AIDAN FORSTER
2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Reclined in spring’s bright fiction / I fill the first glamour shot / legs pretty & buckwild / What I know tickertapes / across the bottom of my screen: / Jeremy works sales / in New Jersey / & an alloyed stud / crowns Alessandro’s dick / & Douglas prefers porker to pussy / & a finch bursts / with last season’s song / & it’s impossible to count / all the meadows widowing / between me & this photo of myself / Impossible to believe / any one of these men / would spill poppers on my face / or video my death drop / for their boyfriends, back home / But if I bend to pick up a quarter / one million boys arrive in salt / to take a picture of it / My pixels sexed / with a blue & milky light / & it’s hard not to consider / my own shimmering radius / & it’s hard not to consider / wooing a cottonwood / or sexting a cop / because suddenly there’s nothing I can’t do / & it’s hard not to consider / my first brief pornography / His tongue’s lunar passage / beyond the rim of my thigh / my heart a candle buried / in wet loam, buried / at the water’s edge / How I didn’t know I was a child / until someone told me so / boy effigy in digital seersucker / & now spring hoards / its morning sermons / & now I hold two fingers / against the thrumming screen / zoom in on my chronic sweetness / & now He sings in some tropical gyre / & does not fumble for the diamond / His jaw’s honeyed machinery clicking open & shut / but slides His finger, finally, into it / & the video buffers before He can say / whatever it is He will say / but we know the truth, me / & the men I love / that someday I will be more / than this failed mockingbird / but not by much / & wildfire smoke ruins my bonnet / & I sext him & him / & him & him / & him & him / & they’re all crying too
